Tech Giants to Team Up for Boosting CXL Consortium Data Centre Performance

Among the top 9 tech giants all around the world, Intel, Google, and Microsoft have come together to introduce a novel and fresh industry collaboration to accelerate data center performance.

The collaboration includes companies like Cisco Dell EMC, Alibaba, Facebook, HPE and Huawei and together they are looking forward to coagulating CXL (Computer Express Link). Notably, CXL is an emerging fast-paced CPU-to-device and CPU-to-Memory interconnect. CXL, when combined with the boon of artificial intelligence, will enhance the efficiency of HPC (High-Performance Computing).

In a statement by these companies, it has been made clear that Intel, Microsoft, and other organizations have approved the CXL Specification 1.0 which is built on PCI Express infrastructure. This infrastructure aims at offering high geared speed alongside supporting ecosystem that is capable of adopting fast performance.

The press release presented by companies over the operation over CXL, quoted – "CXL technology maintains memory coherency between the CPU memory space and memory on attached devices, which allows resource sharing for higher performance, reduced software stack complexity, and lower overall system cost. This permits users to simply focus on target workloads as opposed to the redundant memory management hardware in their accelerators."

The statement further cited – "CXL was designed to be an industry open standard interface for high-speed communications, as accelerators are increasingly used to complement CPUs in support of emerging applications such as artificial intelligence and machine learning."

However, the consortium is not limited up to this, it's already working on CXL Specification 2.0 and hopes to add up more companies (dealing in cloud services, communications OEMs and system OEMs) to the initiative.

Jim Pappas, Intel director of technology initiatives said – "CXL is an important milestone for data-centric computing, and will be a foundational standard for an open, dynamic accelerator ecosystem."